Tyler Gibb - Writer, Director, Editor, Filmmaker

My wonderful wife-like person has a desk job downtown. As we’re coming up on the end of the year, she decided it was time to do a little desk clean up. In one of the desk drawers she found a small jar of honey that she had stowed there some time ago. She’d brought the sweetener to work to have with her afternoon tea. Evidently she’d misplaced the jar and forgotten about it. She asked me if I thought the honey could still be edible.

Ah, my sweet woman… One more reason to love you. You give me opportunities like these to validate my archive of trivial knowledge by applying it to common, everyday situations!

The honey is definitely edible, I declared. Honey is the only food, in fact, that doesn’t go bad. Jars of it were pulled out of an ancient Egyptian tomb once upon a time and the samples were still good to go.

Those bees know what they’re doing. Not to take anything away from the ancient Egyptians of course, but the pyramids are hardly what you’d call pristine anymore. As a matter of fact, you’d be hard pressed to come up with anything man-made that has the lasting integrity and appeal as bee-made honey. And these days the expiration term on things is just getting shorter and shorter.

But not honey. Because bees don’t mess around. They don’t get distracted. They’ve got their one thing and they keep working on it. Day in and day out, generation after generation. They hone it. They refine it. They make it pure. Elemental.

That’s how you make something with lasting integrity. Lasting appeal.

Mankind Book 3 is still in the works. Just taking a little break here while Photoshop recovers from my working it too hard.

Before Mankind it’d been a while since I’d picked up the drawing pencil, focusing more on the typewriter. Getting back into illustration has been fun. It’s also got me thinking about a question that I used to get asked a lot, especially in art classes. “How do you make up things up from nothing, and get them from your head onto the paper?”

The truth is, I don’t. Not exactly anyway. I think the impression from artists who illustrate the world around them is that people who draw from their brains are working in the same way. Copying the imagined image onto the paper. But it’s not really so - at least not in my case. When I start to draw, I know conceptually what I’m going for, but I can’t say it manifests itself as an actual image in my mind. And every pencil stroke brings with it micro adaptations and recalculations that are ultimately going to effect that image. It’s like constant back and forth between the juices in my head and the physicality of the pencil and paper.

I saw this back and forth play out in a similar fashion when I started directing. You have a concept in mind but there are simply too many variables in the universe for you to ever re-create that exact scene. So you adapt. You recalculate. You have to. I’ve seen - and we may often hear about - directors who have meltdowns when they are unable to adapt in this way. When they try and ultimately fail to recreate what they see in their heads in front of the camera. As though the process of adaptation is a compromise. To the contrary, that’s where the actual skill is required.

I’m glad I don’t have that problem. After all, I’m the only one who knows exactly what I had in mind to begin with so for all intents, what winds up on the paper (or screen) is exactly that.

Photoshop has stopped its brooding. Back to work!

Just in time for Christmas and slightly too late for Halloween, Pride and Prejudice & Zombies with an “illustration” by yours truly.

Have you seen these things? Complete, classic works of literature printed on a single sheet of paper - and they’re totally legible too… From up close.

From a distance however, you can bask in the genius of simplified cut-out illustrations like the one I hatched for the Seth Grahame-Smith redux of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, now being adapted into a feature film / great fucking idea, wish I’d thought of it first: Instead, see large cut-out illustration for which I got paid… A free poster.

All seriousness though, quality prints that you can hang on a wall because turning pages is for suckers.

Here’s the link to Spineless Classics, the publisher of the posters. Make sure to tell them that for you, it’s all about the illo and that hot shot, Tyler Gibb.

I’m starting to get letters so…

Fear not! Mankind Book 3 is in the pipe. It’s on the way. It’s written, it’s drawn, it’s lettered, it’s being coloured as you read this. That’s right. Right this minute.

It’ll be worth the wait. This, I promise.

In the meantime… How many people have you infected today?

I write a lot. And as any follower of this weblog knows, I also produce as much of that writing as I can into movies (however modest). But the scale will forever be tipped in favour of the amount of writing I do versus the amount of independent movies I produce on my own.

Only recently have I started approaching others. Others who may be helpful in turning these words on a page into pictures on a screen.

And I know I have a lot to offer. Literally, in terms of sheer quantity of writing; I have a lot of material to offer. After all, unlike most, I’m able to write full time. All day long, everyday of the week - not many are as fortunate. I thought this was an asset. Points in my favour. If someone in the industry were to ask me, “what are you working on?” I could easily ramble off the log lines to half a dozen projects I’ve been polishing over the past few months. Let alone an arsenal of material still undeveloped. How impressive I must seem to these curators of content!

No.

No, it’s only recently come to my attention that I may not look that way at all. See the guy with a ton of scripts lying around kinda looks like the guy who has nothing of value.

There’s an industry expectation when it comes to writers. Or perhaps the perception of an industry expectation. It goes like this: Writers are poor, lazy, alcoholic procrastinators, who work day jobs in video stores and devote very little time to actually writing. So if you show up to the party with half a dozen scripts, people think - damn, if you’ve got that many screenplays under your belt, how come I’ve never heard of you?

So I get it. It makes sense from this traditional viewpoint. Trouble is, there’s nothing traditional about entertainment any more. You can spend all your days writing and never pitching and wind up with a surplus simply because you like to produce as much of it on your own as you can. You can quietly amass thousands, even millions of fans of your work without ever making a blip on the radar of traditional entertainment.

But it doesn’t matter. When it comes to pitching my wares, I’m viewed as a writer. Even though I’m ambitious, don’t drink, only procrastinate doing things I hate (like a normal person) and haven’t worked in a video store since I was 21. It doesn’t matter to them. And I’m not here to change any one’s mind. I mean, sure, I’ll bitch about it on my own website but when it comes to getting the meeting you want to get, it’s all about accepting terms. Compromising. Adapting.

So I’ve amended my approach. You don’t want to hear about a range of possibilities. You don’t want choices. You don’t want surprises or new points of view. You just want something good. So “what am I working on?” Just one thing: The best fucking script you’ll ever read.